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Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Show Notes: Indoor Navigation for the Blind – PERCEPT Project at U Mass
Dr Aura Ganz Director & James Schafer systems engineer – http://percept.ecs.umass.edu/
Bookshare Student Shares Reading Success in White House Film Festival | Bookshare Blog http://bit.ly/1dNAhVX
15 Things You Didn’t Know Your iPhone Could Do http://bzfd.it/1pMud1y
Taxi Surcharge to Fund Accessible Cabs http://nyti.ms/1dNuUpI
Webinars – Assistive Technology Industry Association http://bit.ly/1pMtiht
Microsoft Office for iPad Arrives with Word, Excel, & PowerPoint http://bit.ly/1dNuGyG
Wheelchair Users Can Go Down Stairs with New Invention http://bit.ly/1pMrS6B
App: Endless Alphabet – www.BridgingApps.org
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—–transcript follows —–
JAMES SCHAFER: Hi, this is James Schafer, and I’m the systems engineer in the 5G Mobile Evolution Labs at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
AURA GANZ: And hi, this is Aura Ganz. I’m a professor at the electrical and computer engineering department at University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and the principal investigator of Percept Project, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.
WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana with your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology, designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs. Welcome to episode number 149 of Assistive Technology Update. It’s scheduled to be released on April 4 of 2014. Today we have an interview with Dr.Aura Ganz and James Schaefer, who are with the University of Massachusetts, and they are doing a thing called the Percept Project that has to do with indoor navigation technology for people who are blind or visually impaired. Interesting emerging technology. I think we’re kind of on the forefront of something big here.
Also we have an app from the BridgingApps folks called endless alphabet which is pretty cool. We have some stories about a wheelchair that can go downstairs. Now that Microsoft office is available on your iPad, how is that going to help? Webinars from the ATIA. A plan in New York to have a taxi surcharge to increase the number of accessible cabs. And kind of a fun story called 15 things you didn’t know your iPhone could you.
Give us a call on our listener line. We would love to hear what’s in your assistive technology toolbox. Would love to take your questions or just hear what you think about our show. The number is 317-721-7124. Or visit us on the web at www.eastersealstech.com, or shoot us a note on Twitter @IDATAproject.
Hi, my name is Carson Maxon, and I’m an eighth-grade student Olivet Middle School in Olivet, Michigan. All of my life, I’ve struggled with reading and writing. The fourth and fifth –
WADE WINGLER: That’s Carson Maxon, who is a student with a learning disability and entered his video in the White House Film Festival. I’ll pop a link in the show notes. Check out Carson’s school video.
As you can imagine around the assistive technology center here at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indianapolis, we have a lot of information flying around about the latest and greatest technology tips for people with disabilities. One of the things that was buzzing around our staffs email box this week is an article from Buzzfeed called “The 15 Things You Didn’t Know Your iPhone Could Do.” The joke around the shop was how many of these 15 things to do now. I won’t divulge who knew what, but I’ll tell you some of these I know. I’m going to include some of them here for you to learn about.
One is that you can make a passcode with letters instead of just numbers to unlock your phone. You can have Siri read your email out loud. You can see timestamps on every single one of your text messages. You can get Siri to tell you which airplanes are overhead of your location at any particular time, what their angle is, and what their altitude is. You can shake your iPhone to delete some text that you just typed. You can see a more detailed view of your calendar by turning your phone sideways. You can double tap the caps lock key to hold down the shift button. You can use your phone as a level to hang pictures. You can turn off all in-app purchases with a single button. You can take a burst of photos with your phone. You can type all kinds of dashes, whether they are hyphens or dashes or funny looking dashes, there are options for that. And you can take a photo with the volume button of your phone, or you could use your earbuds to take a photo with her phone. Also you can add custom vibrations to your phone so that you know by the way before the vibrating who is calling. My personal favorite, if you put iPhone in airplane mode, it will charged twice as fast. If you want the details on any one of these tips for your iPhone, check our show notes. We’ll link you over to Buzzfeed and you can figure out come of these 15 things, how many did you know.
According to the New York Times, Mayor Bill DeBlasio of New York is proposing that there is a $.30 surcharge on all yellow and street hail livery taxi rides. That’s part of a plan to make half of New York City’s taxi fleet accessible by the year 2020. Apparently last year, the Bloomberg administration settled a major class action lawsuit that said that the city was violating the ADA because only 230 of the city’s more than 13,000 yellow taxes were accessible to wheelchair users. A portion of this $.30 will go to drivers to offset the cost, education and those kinds of things, and the taxi cab proponents are fussing a little bit. Obviously with the cost change here, you can imagine there’s a lot of political wrangling going on about the pros and cons of this. I’m not going to cover that part of the article, but I will stick a link in the show notes over to the New York Times articles so you can read more about these plans to charge more for cab rides to make them more accessible. You can draw your own conclusions. Check our show notes.
It never ceases to amaze me how much content there is online to help you do better with assistive technology, whether you’re an assistive technology user, and educator, a professional, or just somebody who is fascinated with assistive technology. ATIA, the Assistive Technology Industry Association, has a series of webinars with all kinds of cool topics. The prices tend to range between $39 and $49 come and here are a few things that are coming up. Mike Marotta is going to be doing a training called “Assistive Technology for Social Integration” on April 9. Carol Page going to be doing one on AAC, or Augmentative and Alternative Communication, “Positive Reinforcement and Positive Behavior Support.” That once coming up on April 24. Ike Presley from the American foundation for the blind is doing one called “Technology for Accessing Electronic Information for People Who are Blind or Visually Impaired.” That will be on April 29. Dave Edyburn is going to do one called “Accessibility in a New Generation of High-Stakes Tests: a Spring 2014 Update.” That one will be on May 14. I’m going to stick a link in the show notes over to the ATIA webinar directory. You can learn more about not only the ones that I mentioned but some that are coming up even later. Check our show notes for those of them is.
One of the criticisms of an iPad over the years has been that you can’t use Microsoft office on it to open your word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Just in the last few days, Microsoft has announced that there is now an Office suite for the iPad from Microsoft that will handle your word, Excel and PowerPoint files. There are some limitations. There is a free version of the app that allows you to base review, copy, and share your content, but won’t allow you to create or edit content. If you’re interested in having the ability to create and edit documents, you need to have an office 365 subscription. I have not had a chance to download it to my iPad yet, nor have I had a chance to check it with voiceover to see if it works with that or the other assistive features of the iOS operating system. My challenge to you, listeners, is if you have had a chance to do that; you’ve downloaded Microsoft office on your iPad and you know how well it works with the built-in accessibility features, let me know. Send me an email, tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or better yet, call our listener line and leave us some feedback, and we’ll include you on an upcoming show. The number is 317-721-7124. Leave your message there on the voicemail box, and we might just include you in an upcoming show. In the meantime, I’m going to pop a link in the show notes over to an OS 10 Daily blog post that tells you more about Microsoft office for the iPad and shows you where you can download it.
I’m looking at a blog post with a headline that reads “Wheelchair Users Can Go Downstairs with New Invention.” This is from the Ams Vans wheelchair blog, and it talks about a new technology that’s called soft wheel. What it is is a regular round wheelchair wheel for a manual wheelchair, but instead of having traditional spokes or the big carpet inserts, it’s got three interestingly positioned shock absorbers. So it looks a little bit like shock you might see in a car. They’re positioned in such a way that if you go downstairs in your wheelchair, it’s designed to absorb the impact in a way that hasn’t been done before. The article claims that it’s new technology, and I am by no means a wheelchair expert, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this before. It looks interesting, and in the video on the website, it shows a gentleman using this technology to go downstairs, and it doesn’t seem to be as jarring an experience as it might be on a regular spoked wheel. I’ll stick a link in the show notes, and you can check out this blog post in a video about this new design for a wheelchair wheel that might reduce the impact if you go downstairs.
Each week, one of our partners tells us what’s happening in the ever-changing world of apps, so here’s an app worth mentioning.
>> Today’s app is Endless Alphabet by Originator Inc. in this app, the child selects the work that they want to work on, and then they select the letter to spell the word. When you touch the letter, it comes to life. It’s this cute little monster that says the sound of the letter makes. You drag it onto the word, and then once you get all the words onto the word, and the work is complete, a little animation plays that explains what the word means. The graphics are just adorable. There’s little monster letters and little monster animations that act out what the word means.
It’s by no means childish, which means this app is great to use with kids that are older. Also, the vocabulary used is a little higher level, so words like juggle and hilarious, not necessarily cat and dog that you would see on apps geared towards younger kids. So you could use this app with older kids who haven’t quite grasped phonics, or you can use it with younger kids that are working on matching letters and letter sounds, or learning letter sounds.
At BridgingApps, we’ve used this app with kids from ages 4 to 10 years old with diagnoses of speech delay, autism, dyslexia, etc. It could be appropriate for kids between the ages of three and 18 because the graphics are not childish, and the music is engaging, but again appropriate for a range of ages. You can find this app on the iTunes store for $6.99, and it will run on iPads, iPhones, iPod touch devices. For more information on this app and others like it, visit BridgingApps.org.
WADE WINGLER: Today on Assistive Technology Update, I’m excited to be joined by Dr. Aura Ganz and James Schafer. They are in Massachusetts at the University of Massachusetts. We’re going to talk today about a very interesting, and I think very innovative, project called the Perceptive Project. I guess I want to first introduce my guess. Dr. Ganz, James, are you there?
AURA GANZ: Yes.
JAMES SCHAFER: Hi there.
WADE WINGLER: Good, hey thank you so much you guys for taking time out of your afternoon to talk with me a little bit. I know you’re excited about the Percept Project, and I am too. Are you guys doing okay today?
AURA GANZ: Yes, very well.
JAMES SCHAFER: Doing excellent.
WADE WINGLER: Good, so as I was preparing to talk with you guys today, I got to thinking, we’re going to talk about navigation system for people who are blind or visually impaired, and I remember it must have been probably 10 or 15 years ago, I was at one of the national conferences on assistive technology. I think it was Closing the Gap perhaps. A friend of mine who is blind was wearing this big backpack that had a computer in it and had a big wire coming out of the backpack, and he was holding a joystick kind of thing under his arm and in his hand. It was one of the very early navigation systems. It was a GPS system designed specifically for people who are blind or visually impaired. I remember we went outside and we walked around, and it was pretty remarkable that it can figure out where he was and not exactly where she wanted to go, but where he was in relation to streets. It became very apparent very quickly that the thing only worked outside where he had access to GPS signals. The moment we went back into the hotel, it stopped working. That was one of the early limitations in positioning systems for folks who are blind or visually impaired. But I think we’re going to uncover today that you guys are working on a system that kind of deals with some of those problems. Is that right?
AURA GANZ: Yes, of course.
WADE WINGLER: So tell us a little bit, Dr. Ganz, about Percept. Where did the idea come from and why is it important?
AURA GANZ: So Percept is an indoor navigation system for the blind and visually impaired. Blind people only use a phone which carries a Percept application, and the environment or in the building, we are deploying near field communication tags at specific landmarks such as doors, elevators or stairs. When the visually impaired person enters the building, he or she will use a vision-free application and enter a specific destination such as room 309. By touching these tags that are deployed in the environments, the application will provide directions to the specific destination. I’m sure James will provide you a little bit more explanation about how the system works, how the application works, but I want to talk to you about how this idea came about.
So I received a grant from the National Science Foundation some time in 2005, which funded me to develop something called animated spaces, or spaces that actually can talk to you or can talk to the user or can talk to people that navigate through the environment. It was very clear to me that this technology can be very useful for people who don’t have vision or visually impaired people and can guide them through this environment to their desired destination. We started to develop Percept systems using funding from the National Institute of Health, National Eye Institute, which provided us funding to develop the first prototype of Percept systems.
WADE WINGLER: So, Dr. Ganz, I think a lot of my audience might know the answer to this question already, but tell me why indoor navigation is important for folks were blind or visually impaired.
AURA GANZ: Independent navigation through unfamiliar indoor spacious is a very significant barrier for the visually impaired. Currently the visually impaired people need to have assistance by a sighted person to get wherever they desire to go such as a mall, to work, or shopping. So providing a system that provides them with independence is very importance for their lives, like increasing their probability of getting employed. Currently, based on the statistics that I have of the unemployment rate in the visually impaired communities, it’s about 75 percent. We think this technology can provide them the opportunity to travel to work or travel where they need to independently without depending on any people with sight.
WADE WINGLER: That makes a whole lot of sense. Our show tends to be about technology, but really it’s all about technology that fosters independence for folks with disabilities. This clearly does that. So why don’t, Dr. Ganz, or you James, tell me some of the nitty-gritty about how this works. I know involves a smart phone, I know it involves near field communications, but let’s dive in little deeper into that.
JAMES SCHAFER: Okay, so I first want to break Percept into three distinct parts. First, let’s talk about the user. So for the user, they are going to be experiencing Percept through a smartphone application. Now they are going to be using Percept in a building environment, and within the building, we are placing NFC tags, which is short for Near Field Communication. This is technology that is very similar to RFID if you’ve ever used Fast Lane or heard it EZ-Pass or in malls, they will put the security tags inside items and an alert will go through if you go through that security checkpoint. This is a similar technology.
NFC in particular is a near-touch communication where the phone will come in close contact to the tag. Through that, we are able to associate a person’s location. So what we have is a smartphone application that interacts with the building environment, and we are able to know the location of the person.
The final piece of the puzzle is the Percept server. What this does is it digitally represents the building. Through that, we are also able to know and calculate a pathway from where the person is to where they would like to go and translate that into navigation instructions that are sensory landmark-based that are visually impaired or blind person can follow.
WADE WINGLER: So kind of like turn by turn but more like step-by-step with very tactile landmarks.
JAMES SCHAFER: Yes, so instead of like turn by turn, it’s as you say from one sensory landmark to another sensory landmark.
WADE WINGLER: That’s cool. So is this designed to work with or replace traditional orientation and mobility systems?
AURA GANZ: No, it’s designed to work with existing orientation mobility systems. This is a very important guideline that we follow. So the visually impaired person will have their cane or dog, we definitely don’t replace those orientation and mobility tools. This was told to us by orientation mobility specialist. Many projects tried to replace those tools, but none of them was accepted in the visually impaired world.
WADE WINGLER: That makes sense. I think we’ve learned that it takes a lot of different tools. Any navigation system can tell you where you’re going, but you need to know where the top of the staircase is as you’re heading down so that you don’t fall. James, I think you mentioned that you’re using an android phone. Is it tied to the android platform at this point, or is it working on multiple platforms?
JAMES SCHAFER: Currently, right now, it’s working just on the android platform, but we do have the intentions to develop it also for the other mobile platforms including iPhone, which is the most popular platform it seems for the blind and visually impaired.
WADE WINGLER: So it requires the installation of NFC tags and a virtual map of the building. Where does it work and how hard is it to map to building and set up the tags?
JAMES SCHAFER: So currently, one of things that we are developing is another application that we call the ONM tool. What this tool allows us to do is indicates where the doorways, elevators and other sensory landmarks, and automatically this tool will stitch together the pathways throughout the building and provide navigation instructions. So really the goal and the emphasis is to create a system that is low-cost and that doesn’t require a significant amount of engineering time to design all of the routes or to have an orientation and mobility instructor to write each and every navigation instruction from every point in the building. But to have a tool where you can just indicate his landmarks and have Percept generate the navigation instructions itself.
WADE WINGLER: That’s cool, and that sounds like a very interesting way to go about it.
AURA GANZ: I also would like to add that one of the significant benefits of our system is that in case you’re not able to follow the instructions, you can get rerouted to the destination from anywhere in the building. So sometimes it happened to our human subjects, they missed landmarks that are told to them throughout the instructions that we provide. However, it’s not the end of the world. Using our technologies, they can get rerouted to the destination from anywhere. It’s sort of a dynamic system.
WADE WINGLER: So what smart enough to know where you make the wrong turn and using something like breadcrumbs or other technology, help you get back to where you can go the right way again.
AURA GANZ: Yes, so whenever you reach a landmark which may not be the correct landmark, it doesn’t matter, you can be rerouted from this mission from anywhere.
WADE WINGLER: That’s great. So talk to me a little bit about the future of the Percept Project. If an organization were interested in having this technology in their building, what would they do?
AURA GANZ: So currently we are in the process actually of fundraising for our next generation of Percept which will enable us to generalize the solution to any building. This is where we currently are. Moreover, what I mean by generalizing the solution to any building is that we need to write the software that gets us a blueprint of the building and is able to generate the instructions automatically. Obviously this will lower significantly the cost of deployment in any building in the country. So I am now in the phase, writing grants for National Institute of health, National Eye Institute and other funding agencies. In addition to that, we need funding to write the application for the iPhone as James mentioned. This is the most prevalent platform for the visually impaired. So this is currently where we are. I would like also to mention to your listeners that we are currently testing the technology in the subway system of Boston. In Arlington subway station in Boston, which I think is a very important development for this technology it shows how useful it will be.
WADE WINGLER: I think a subway station is a great example of how this technology can be deployed. I can think of lots of public buildings and hospitals and museums and academic buildings and places where this would be very useful, not to mention retail establishments. As I think about this, I have lots of ideas about how this could be used, and I’m sure you do too. If somebody were interested in learning more about the technology, if somebody were listening and wanted to learn more or to invest in the work that you’re doing, how would they reach out to you? How would they find out more about the Percept Project ?
AURA GANZ: Please visit our website which is percept.ecs.umass.edu. Contact me at ganz@ecs.umass.edu. At the website that I just mentioned, there is the description of the technology. There are many press releases that have been released on this technology. I think it’s very informational, and we will be very happy to answer any questions that you may have.
WADE WINGLER: excellent, Dr. Aura Ganz is the director of the 5G Mobile Evolution Lab and professor at University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the principal investigator of the Percept Project. James Schafer is the systems engineer and the project manager for the Percept Project. Dr. Ganz, James, thank you so much for taking some time out of your afternoon to talk with me today.
AURA GANZ: Thank you for the opportunity.
JAMES SCHAFER: Thank you so much, Wade. It was great talking to you.
WADE WINGLER: Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? Call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Looking for show notes from today’s show? Head on over to EasterSealstech.com. Shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. That was your Assistance Technology Update. I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.
